The Microsoft New Commerce Experience, or NCE for short, is a broad set of changes to your licence agreement with Microsoft for Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
Some of these changes are noteworthy and are addressed in this guide and some are smaller, behind-the-scenes changes that will not impact you day-to-day.
Microsoft NCE will initially apply to commercial Office 365 tenants only.
Education, government and non-profit tenants will remain on the existing licencing terms, although this may change in the future.
Under NCE, you will need to decide two things for each subscription you have:
This is the length of the commitment. Monthly and annual commitments are generally available, with three or even five year commitments possible in the future.
This is how often you'd like to be billed. Annual terms can be paid for up-front or in twelve monthly installments. Longer terms in future may offer up-front, annual and monthly options.
At launch, there are only really three options available from which to choose:
The most flexible option but as a result also the most expensive.
Cheaper than monthly, but less flexible, you'll be billed for twelve months' usage each year in advance.
The same price as the annual up-front option, but split into twelve and billed once per month. We envisage most customers opting for this choice.
The price rises due to NCE only affect monthly commitments.
All monthly subscriptions will incur a price rise of 20% under NCE comapred to current prices.
All annual subscriptions will stay the same price under NCE compared to current prices.
There are short-term promotions from Microsoft for both monthly and annual commitments on NCE until the end of March 2022. These will help reduce the rise of monthly and make annual slightly cheaper than current prices.
You will be able to add more licences to a subscription mid-term, but not deduct any after an initial 7 day window has passed.
Historically all Office 365 subscriptions have been on annual term agreements with Microsoft, but Microsoft has not been enforcing its cancellation policy.
By cancellation Microsoft means the ability to reduce the number of licences you have on a subscription within the agreed term - for any reason.
This will change with NCE, and Microsoft will be enforcing their cancellation policy, stopping you from reducing your licence quantity within the term.
As part of NCE, Microsoft is changing the date of its Microsoft 365 invoicing to on or around the 8th of the month.
We will stick with our existing end-of-month invoicing whilst in transition to NCE, but once that transition is complete our billing date will shift to be on or around the 10th of each month.
Microsoft will be enforcing NCE for new subscriptions from 10 March 2022 and renewals from 11 July 2022.
If we undertake the migration for you, there will be no downtime or disruption involved in migrating subscriptions to NCE. Once you agree your preferences for term duration and billing cycle with us, we will take care of everything.
The Nimmbus portal has undergone a significant upgrade to accommodate NCE and is fully compatible with (a significantly faster than!) the Microsoft systems.
Nimmbus customers can continue to enjoy on-going discounts versus the Microsoft public pricing and full use of the Nimmbus portal.
It is worth reviewing the latest terms that apply which have been updated in light of the NCE changes:
We will be in touch with you to discuss NCE in more detail and answer any questions you may have, but our Account Managers are standing by should you have any questions or concerns in the meantime.
There has never been a better time to switch to Nimmbus!
Sign-up with us now and we can manage your migration to NCE and lock-in savings on all of your Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
Sign-up NowThe new commerce experience was launched in Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Provider program for Azure plan, Server subscriptions, and Azure reserved instances in 2019.